“Just follow your passion” - is this good advice?
We tend to hear this kind of advice quite often. But how helpful is it to advise a young person to “just follow your passion”? I would suggest that, most of the time, it is not particularly helpful. But, as with many questions, “it depends” is probably the best response. And what it depends on, of course, is exactly who you are talking to. As any good counsellor, advisor or educator knows, you need to understand the individual in front of you.
Working in my last school, an international school in Thailand, I found that the vast majority of students I met with were hard-pressed to name their passion. If they did name one, it was often football, movies, gaming or something similar. There is nothing inherently wrong with these pursuits, except that pursuing them professionally is highly competitive and offers relatively few opportunities to make a career out of them. When I asked students about their ‘academic’ passion, I was often met with blank faces or a response along the lines of, ‘Well, I don’t mind History.’ Hardly passionate.
Some teenagers do have an ‘academic’ passion, and that’s wonderful. Some will positively ‘like’ History, while others will ‘love’ it. If a student expresses a passion for, say, medicine, economics or psychology, then you would be daft not to encourage this. These are all fantastic disciplines, offering the opportunity for worthwhile study and potentially rewarding and lucrative careers. Of course, caution is needed when young people are making major decisions based on something that may turn out to be a passing enthusiasm. I recently had a student who spent a year talking about getting into medical school, only to do a complete 180-degree turn in her final year and apply for a film degree because, as she put it, “it’s my new passion”. There was nothing wrong with that change of direction, of course; discovering a new interest and changing your mind is part of the process. The point is simply that what feels like a passion at 16 or 17 may not necessarily be the thing you want to pursue a few years later.
And what about those with a fascination for subjects or careers where the opportunities may be perceived as limited, or which are low on the ‘earnings’ list? Drama, sociology, philosophy. Should they follow these passions? Well, again, I think my response is still in the affirmative: yes, follow that passion. Let’s look at what courses you can do in these subjects and where, and let’s look at the opportunities that those degrees can present.
This can be a challenging approach, or at least it was when I worked in Asia. There was sometimes tension with parents who were keen to push their children in a certain direction, often towards a lucrative or prestigious career or, quite understandably, simply something with ‘better job prospects’. In addition, university is generally not cheap, and most people understandably want a return on their investment. But these tensions can be managed and negotiated.
In some ways, in this rapidly changing, AI-driven world, this is becoming easier to do as students and parents understand how quickly the world of work is changing. The comparative employability rankings of different degrees that we often see published are constantly changing, and are likely to again and again. STEM subjects, once the go-to choice for courses you ‘should do’, can no longer automatically be assumed to be the safest route into employment. The Humanities, meanwhile, may have a new relevance. In this unprecedented technological age, making choices, understanding right and wrong, deciding what to value and safeguarding what it means to be human have become more important than ever. Without knowing what careers will be available on the ever-closer horizon, transferable skills and adaptability, which many degrees can help develop, are becoming the key watchwords.
It is also worth remembering that, for some careers, it is the fact that you have a degree, rather than the particular discipline you studied, that matters most. Many graduates go on to work in fields that are not directly related to their degree subject. We should not assume that choosing a degree in a subject you enjoy necessarily means committing yourself to a career in that subject. My daughter studied Liberal Arts, a degree she mostly loved, but soon after graduating she secured a good job in sales. Her degree did not dictate her career, but it gave her three years to explore a range of subjects, develop skills and gain a qualification that she could take in unexpected directions.
So what if there is no ‘passion’ identified? Well, if there is a ‘fun’ hobby or an underwhelming academic interest, at least as counsellors and advisors we have something to work with: finding a hook, something that might reveal an interest or talent. For example, from football we could highlight teamwork, or from gaming, problem-solving. Even without that obvious hook, there are other tools to unearth these competencies, such as career-interest assessments and personality profiling. All of these approaches can help students move towards a ‘good fit’ choice of degree.
Real passion often comes to us gradually over time, beyond high school, as learners of whatever age follow one lead after another, entering one rabbit hole after another. Those three or four years at university are ripe for this kind of discovery, whether it springs from the actual degree we are engaged in or from something more incidental along the way. My son, for instance, is on a business management course and has developed a growing interest in events management, not so much from the course itself, but rather from a summer spent working at festivals.
University is also an opportunity to experiment. Students can try new subjects, join societies, take on projects, volunteer, find internships and develop abilities they didn't know they had. Sometimes these experiences confirm an existing interest; sometimes they reveal something entirely unexpected. Rather than needing to know exactly where they are heading before they arrive, students can use these years to explore possibilities, build skills and discover what they enjoy and what they are good at.
Perhaps, then, we should talk less about passion and more about interest. Interest is a much less intimidating concept, and one that gives us something to work with. A student doesn’t need to love a subject to want to explore it further. They might simply find it interesting, enjoy certain aspects of it, or want to understand more about how something works. Sometimes, passion doesn’t come before competence; it develops because we become good at something and discover that we enjoy it. Following these interests, experimenting, developing skills and seeing where they lead may be a much more realistic starting point than trying to identify a passion.
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